Bannerman Mosin Nagant .30-06 Conversion

Today I’m taking a look at a Mosin Nagant converted to .30-06 caliber in the early 1920s by Francis Bannerman & Sons. They were a huge surplus arms and equipment company for many decades – the Century International Arms of their time, in some ways. They bought a bunch of surplus Remington and New England Westinghouse Mosin Nagant rifles as surplus after WWI, and converted many of them to .30-06 for the American hunting market. While a military rifle that was sporterized yesterday has little remaining value, these Bannerman guns are old enough that they have acquired newfound collector status as an interesting curio of the 1920s.

After publishing this video, I was contacted by a couple engineers who ran the numbers on the strength of the cut-down chamber of this sort of conversion, and determined that it was taking stress far in excess of its design load - and thus was potentially unsafe to shoot. I would not recommend shooting these (and haven't done so myself since filming this video).